Subject: [mg116628] Re: FinancialData Function Not Working for Property "Members"

From: Syd Geraghty <sydgeraghty at me.com>

Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 04:42:42 -0500 (EST)

Gregory,
To respond to your explanation:
"But might it not have to do with Yahoo Finance not making the information available anymore as Min Hsuan Peng suggested?"
That may perhaps be true and it is central to one of my main concerns about the direction that WRI are taking with "Computable Data", "free form input", and Wolfram Alpha (W|A).
There is a tendency toward implicit guarantee of functionality away from "explicit best efforts guarantee of functionality" (which is generally well documented) in the newer product offerings such as W|A and newer features being implemented in Mathematica itself!
If something as fundamental (and clearly documented with examples in the Documentation Center) as the elementary expression FinancialData["SP500", "Members"] is not within WRI's ability to support in perpetuity then extrapolating that scenario to other third party data dependencies potentially makes development of products based on the WRI ecosystem very problematic.
I prefer to think this particular problem is just a data management bug and not systemic. Time will tell.
I still have reservations about the use of free form inputs (which inherently cannot have a documented output) and W|A results where the implication is that results are "reliable" and will continue to be "in some sense" repeatable.
I trust that we Mathematica and Wolfram | Alpha users are not on an experimental roller coaster which is being constructed in real time without a net.
Cheers .... Syd
Syd Geraghty B.Sc, M.Sc.
sydgeraghty at mac.com
Mathematica 8.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (November 6, 2010)
MacOS X V 10.6.5 Snow Leopard
MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM
On Feb 21, 2011, at 5:12 PM, Gregory Lypny wrote:
> Hi Syd,
>
> Thanks for responding. But might it not have to do with Yahoo Finance not making the information available anymore as Min Hsuan Peng suggested?
>
> Regards,
>
> Gregory
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011, at 7:30 PM, Syd Geraghty wrote:
>
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> A quick check on my system reveals that your example and examples in the documentation show that a data feed has a bug.
>>
>> Your example:
>>
>> In[14]:= FinancialData["SP500", "Members"]
>>
>> Out[14]= Missing["NotAvailable"]
>>
>> And from the documentation for FinancialData[]:
>>
>> In[2]:= FinancialData["SP500"]
>>
>> Out[2]= 1343.01
>>
>> which is OK but then
>>
>> In[3]:= Take[FinancialData["SP500", "Members"], 10]
>>
>> During evaluation of In[3]:= Take::take: Cannot take positions 1 through 10 in Missing[NotAvailable]. >>
>>
>> Out[3]= Take[Missing["NotAvailable"], 10]
>>
>> Suggest a bug report.
>>
>> Cheers .... Syd
>>
>> Syd Geraghty B.Sc, M.Sc.
>>
>> sydgeraghty at mac.com
>>
>> Mathematica 8.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (November 6, 2010)
>> MacOS X V 10.6.5 Snow Leopard
>> MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM
>>
>> On Feb 19, 2011, at 2:15 AM, Gregory Lypny wrote:
>>
>>> Hello anyone who uses the FinancialData function,
>>>
>>> I used to be able to get the members of the S&P500 and the S&P100 using
>>>
>>> FinancialData["SP500", "Members"]
>>>
>>> and then the ticker symbols to do analyses. But both yesterday and
>>> today, the function returns, what appears to be a dash or hyphen (-).
>>> This also happens for industry members such as FinancialData["Books",
>>> "Members"] and FinancialData["Drugs", "Members"], where I used the
>>> examples in the built-in Help system, but foreign exchanges like
>>> Frankfurt work fine.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts on why this happens? I'm concerned because I have
>>> notebooks that I share with students and colleagues, and the analyses in
>>> them can't be done if the ticker symbols are not picked up!
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Gregory
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>